Read, Hot and Digitized: French Revolution Pamphlets

Read, hot & digitized: Librarians and the digital scholarship they love — In this series, librarians from the Libraries’ Arts, Humanities and Global Studies Engagement Team briefly present, explore and critique existing examples of digital scholarship to encourage and inspire critical reflection of and future creative contributions to the growing fields of digital scholarship.

The French Revolution Pamphlets Digital Initiative, based at the Newberry Library in Chicago, is a large-scale digitization initiative that makes digital copies of over 38,000 documents, mostly pamphlets, accessible online. The documents, which primarily consist of material published between 1780 and 1810, encompass 850,000 pages of text, and the dataset produced by the project, containing OCR and metadata files, is roughly 11 gigabytes. This collection of French Revolutionary materials is among the most comprehensive in the world, and enriches the study not only of French and European history, but casts light on broader concepts of revolution and social transformation relevant to a global audience. The materials are of interest to numerous fields of study, including legal, social, and cultural history and the history of printing and publication.

The homepage for the project, built in Scalar.

The
collection gathers materials from a number of the Newberry’s collections,
including the French Revolution Collection, the Louis XVI Trial and Execution
Collection, and several smaller groups of French Revolution era material. The
materials chronicle the political, social and religious dimensions of the
Revolution’s history, and include works by a diverse set of authors, including
Robespierre, Marat, and Louis XIV. The texts include arguments both in support
of and opposing the monarchy between 1789 and 1799, and serve as a firsthand
chronicle of the First Republic. The collection includes complete runs of
well-known journals, many rare and unknown publications, and about 3,000 French
political pamphlets published between 1560 to 1653 that document a period of
religious wars and the establishment of the absolute monarchy.

The
main interface for the project was built in Scalar, a free and open source web authoring platform from the The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture at USC. The Scalar site links to the
digital copies of the pamphlets, hosted on archive.org, as well as translations of select
pamphlets. The sites also includes a number of other valuable resources,
including data downloads, digital pedagogy materials, and pages designed for
librarians interested in working with the digital collection.

The digitized pamphlets on archive.org.

To
help support scholarship using the collection, the Newberry has funded an open
data grant to support researchers working with the project’s large data set.
The recipients of the
first grant,
Joseph Harder and Mimi Zhou, are conducting a sentiment analysis of the French
Revolution materials, assigning numerical values to word-use in order to code
for positive and negative tone across the data. By applying sentiment analysis
to both the popular press and propaganda, Harder and Zhou hope to find trends
in public opinion throughout the French Revolution, and to see how those trends
shaped the revolution’s political outcomes.

The project’s data on GitHub.

The project serves as
an important contribution to digital scholarship in European Studies. The sheer
volume of the project’s digitized materials alone is impressive, but the
variety of the resources it encompasses makes it particularly distinctive. Its
venture into funding research using an open data grant—and the fact that its
data set is openly available to anyone who wants to download it—is especially
exciting, and I look forward to seeing the scholarship that results from making
these materials freely accessible online. For those interested in exploring
French Revolutionary materials in the UT Austin Libraries, I recommend looking
through our extensive
holdings on the subject, including our collection
of pamphlets, both in
print and on microfilm.